So my first lesson was that open source is no magic bullet: just because you host your code on GitHub won’t automatically make people want to help you out.

First rule of doing anything collaborative online: hardly anyone will show any interest in helping out, and of those who do, only some actually will. (I learned that over 20 years ago already, writing game material instead of software, but I doubt that makes much difference.) It’s usually far better to simply do the work yourself and rope in a few people as testers, proofreaders, or similar and — vitally — not expect anyone to praise you for your hard work once you put it up for download.

@wharrgarbl I'm not madly familiar with Telescope, and from reading that I'm madly confused. He links to producthunt, and talks about what a close-source success it is. But I can look at producthunt and see immediately what it is - its a website/app that contains a lot of content about the latest in tech. They're not pushing a platform, they're not selling that platform, they're providing content, and selling the eyeballs.

They built there community based on an interest in that content not an interest in building a platform for content.
In short- they have a business model. If Telescope has a business model, its hard to deduce what it is from this article.

Is Telescope the company about building Telescope the platform, or Telescope the website?
If its about Telescope the website, where's the content? What differentiates them from Hacker News?

Groovy modern user interfaces and frameworks are nice, but if there's no substitute for content.

It's extremely difficult to make money from selling software tools. It's almost as hard to make it from selling a platform. You can make money from services and content, though those are also a lot more effort to put together (e.g., you need some sort of curation, and that requires employed people). OSS does best in the tools space, and reasonably well in the platforms space. It's not great for services and content, but you might do those by using selected OSS systems as part of your overall offering (assuming you've got a solid value-add on top).

Anyone not clear about what value they're bringing to market should GTFO.

So I figured I would come out with a basic version of the app, make the project open source, sit back as pull requests poured in, and use the resulting improvements to make Sidebar even better.

Translation: "So I figured I'd be a lazy fuck and expect others to work for me for free."

This is probably obvious to anybody who’s paying attention to the open source world. But before starting this project, I have to confess I had no idea the workload distribution would be so skewed towards myself.

Translation: "I'm a special snowflake who thinks everyone is interested in exactly the same projects as me."

Open source projects need to target two groups of people: users and developers. Here’s the thing though: at least in Telescope’s case, there is little overlap between these two audiences.

FTFY

You see, I had initially made the naive mistake of assuming my end users would also be the ones who’d contribute code back and make Telescope better.

"When you assume something, you make an ass out of u. And don't expect sympathy from me."

I couldn’t have been more wrong. First of all, there’s only 24 hours in a day: the more time someone spends customizing their app and building up their community, the less time they have to contribute code back to the core codebase.

Time is limited. News at 11.

And secondly, there’s just no reason why people wanting to launch their own social news app would also happen to be developers. Yes, it turns out that a substantial amount of people don’t spend their days in front of a text editor. Who knew!?

Everyone but you, apparently. Also, that's a question, not an exclamation: use the right punctuation mark.

If you’re skilled enough to create a popular open source app, you’re probably skilled enough to write a book about doing it

@gwowen yeah, I guess it's just that closed source software (especially successful closed source software) is more likely to have hired someone specifically to write docs. If you're skilled enough to create a popular open source app you're skilled enough to work on a popular closed source app as well

First rule of doing anything collaborative online: hardly anyone will show any interest in helping out, and of those who do, only some actually will.

It goes even further than that. First rule of any community, whatever the context, is that most people will be passive and won't contribute (apart maybe from speaking). See lurkers in a forum, contributors to open-source projects, housekeeping in a shared home, volunteering in a Real Life (tm) community etc.

(also and without going to the garage, this is one reason why communism doesn't work)

The only way to break that is to incentivize people to be active e.g. by paying them to do so (i.e. if your boss tells you to do something), but even so most people will do the minimum they can and a few key people will be the main actors.

I think they fell for the "open source utopia" bullshit, the idea that we don't need companies and stuff, we just need to make everything open source and "the people" will take care of developing everything.